


Holding the Universe Together

by esper_aroon



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-11
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-22 08:30:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3722119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esper_aroon/pseuds/esper_aroon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something always goes wrong on a mission. Obi-Wan should have known not to trust his luck.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(They’d been half-way back to Coruscant when something had gone bang! in the engines, and the next thing Obi-Wan had known, Anakin was pulling his crazy, lunatic, insane flying stunts to land them on the nearest planet.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holding the Universe Together

**Author's Note:**

> An older ficlet that I've posted on lj before. Set sometime before AotC, Anakin is a teenager. No plot what-so-ever, just long-suffering Obi-Wan, sillyness and an attempt at humor. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars or anything related, and I make no money from this.

Considering everything, Obi-Wan really should’ve seen it coming. A light year away.

The mission had gone well, fantastically really. He and Anakin had gotten on the planet without problems. No space pirates to ambush them on the way, no crash landing to some Force-forsaken wasteland in the middle of nowhere, no angry locals who’d suddenly decided they didn’t want help after all. They smoothed the negotiations, oversaw the signing of the peace treaty and were on their way back home with not even a single injury. Anakin hadn’t even made more than three or four possibly disastrous mistakes during the whole thing.

(He _really_ should’ve known not to trust his luck. He didn’t even believe in it, for Force’s sake!)

So, they’d been half-way back to Coruscant when something had gone _bang!_ in the engines, and the next thing Obi-Wan had known, Anakin was pulling his crazy, lunatic, _insane_ flying stunts to land them on the nearest planet. Which just so happened to be some backwater rock that was only starting to dabble with space travel.

(Or, as they found out, was trying to reinvent it, seeing the place was most likely some early human settlement that had lost communication with the rest of the Galaxy and promptly forgotten its existence.)

Luckily, the inhabitants were mostly human. Mostly being the keyword. A nasty little… _thing_ – which looked like a very small woman with translucent wings in a green, even smaller dress and who obviously had a very filthy mouth even if Obi-Wan didn’t understand the words – bit him on his left hand the moment he stepped out of the ship. Anakin could inform him that it was called a pixie – how the padawan knew that, he had no idea – but even Anakin didn’t know if it’s bites were dangerous.

Just to be sure, he put a bacta-patch over the small teeth marks.

Not so luckily, the thing that had gone _bang!_ in the engines ended up being their hyperdrive, and apparently Anakin didn’t have anything to fix it with. (He did say he could hold it together with the Force until they got back to Coruscant, but there was _no way_ Obi-Wan would willingly fly a ship that was held together with only somebody’s will. Even if that somebody was Anakin.)

(Or possibly, _especially_ if that somebody was Anakin.)

To make things even worse, the local government had somehow noticed their arrival, and before Obi-Wan could even begin to think about a possible solution to their problem, the planet’s army was raining down on them. Not that they were in any real danger, really, since the native weaponry was so archaic it would’ve taken more than a few years of constant bombardment for their shields to fail. Nevertheless, it was another headache Obi-Wan _didn’t need_.

He was tempted to follow Anakin’s suggestion of “just blowing them up with the left ion canon” and be done with it.

(…he _really_ needed some meditation. Honestly.)

In the end, it was resolved that using their more advanced firepower against their current – and apparently quite baffled – enemy wouldn’t be proper behavior for a jedi (they didn’t have even the most rudimental shields to protect themselves with!) and so they fled. Although, not before Anakin had his chance to scare the troops into disorder with a low lift off and a few completely unnecessarily flying stunts.

(Obi-Wan most certainly _did not_ take any pleasure when, five minutes later, his unruly padawan nearly crashed with the strangest flying device he’d ever seen. It looked like a large tube with two long and narrow appendages sticking from the middle, and was honestly quite ridiculous. Couldn’t have been very practical either.)

The next half a day or so passed in a haze, and later Obi-Wan could only recall the episode that followed Anakin’s discovery of their lack of food. (No, don’t go there. He will never be able to eat anything that comes in a somewhat round paper wrapping in his life again. Just so… _uncivilized_.)

Somewhere along the noble quest of finding nutrition, Anakin managed not only to traumatize his master for life, but saved a local girl too, and dragged her back to the ship with him. He also succeeded in alerting the army, and so before the out of control (once again) padawan could even inform Obi-Wan of the details of _that_ particular adventure (which he didn’t and still doesn’t want to know), they had to flee again. By that time Obi-Wan had given up massaging his temples in hopes of getting rid of the headache and had just sighed as the ship shot towards the sky with needlessly high speed.

And that is how they more or less ended up where they are _now_ (on the side of a hill, behind a large sign that says in the planet’s strange writing system something that the girl Anakin picked up pronounces more or less _ha-le-wood_ , whatever it might mean). Anakin has crouched next to the broken hyperdrive, and Obi-Wan is standing by to pass him whatever tool he thinks will help next. The girl – who speaks a very peculiar dialect of the Galactic Standard – is next to Anakin, thoroughly enthralled with a screwdriver that hovers in the air above his padawan’s shoulder.

At the moment, they’re having a conversation about the Force, and it’s all Obi-Wan can do not to pinch the bridge of his nose and sigh loudly.

“Sounds cool, sure. But I don’t really -”, she’s saying, eyes scanning a set of wires above her left shoulder before skipping back to the hovering tool. Obi-Wan stares at the white ceiling and asks for the umpteenth time _what for the love of the Force did I do to deserve this? Was it Melida/Daan? The prank I and Garen pulled on Master Windu?_ “- get what it is. Is it like magic or something?”

Anakin shrugs a little and pokes another piece of machinery. “Not really. It’s kind of complicated.”

She shrugs back. “Simplify it.”

Anakin glances at her and thinks about it a moment. “It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the Universe together.”

(It makes to Obi-Wan’s top ten of worst interpretations of the Force, right between number 8, _it makes people arrogant_ , and number 6, _the freaky magic thing you don’t want to mess with_. Not that he’ll ever admit to having a list.)

The girl blinks and then nods as though the synopsis actually makes some sense. “Alright. We have something like that too”, she says, digging into her backpack and pulling out a wide, silver-colored ring which Obi-Wan at first glance thinks is a metallic bracelet. Then he realizes it isn’t really metal, only colored similarly, and although it could be an ornament, it’s a little… _shaggy_ for that purpose.

(Thoroughly tired with their newest little adventure, he wearily wonders if maybe you can fix hyperdrives with it.)

Anakin takes a look at the ring and raises his eyebrows.

“What’s that?” he asks. The girl grins.

“It’s called the Duct Tape.”

(And yes, it _does_ fix hyperdrives.)

(Later, when they’re well on their way back to Coruscant, Obi-Wan also finds out that it’s very useful for shutting up and restraining disobedient padawans who won’t stop _complaining_.)

**Author's Note:**

> So, the holding the universe together joke? Of course I had to go there.


End file.
